" [I]n an age of disbelief, we play the role of the actor as
well. Stevens emphasizes the point by saying that the audience, hearing the actors
words, "listens, / Not to the play, but to itself," thus becoming actor and
audience at once. The entire movement of the poem is toward the moment of creative fusion
in the mind, "as of two people, as of two / Emotions becoming one." The
actors sole responsibility  and by analogy, the poets  is to
discover the text that will provoke this degree of imaginative sympathy, which may draw
upon the whole range of human activity:

It must

Be the finding of a satisfaction, and may

Be of a man skating, a woman dancing, a woman

Combing. The poem of the act of the mind.

""Of Modern Poetry" is constructed as a scenario of the
kind of text the modern "theater" requires; at the same time, it furnishes us
with an example of that text. It provides the reader not with an idea but with the
dramatized imaginative experience of an idea, and concludes with precisely the sort of
emotional resolution it describes. The three figures of the final lines are abstract
illustrations of a concept, yet they are also perfectly realizable images. The sense of
the sentence suggests that Stevens might have used any three verbs, but clearly these are
not random choices, since skating, dancing, and combing reflect the combination of
activity and solitude that characterize the actors performance. Imagining these
figures, the reader completes the scenario, and in that act of the mind discovers the
sufficient theater the poem set out to find.

But in "Of Modern Poetry," written two years before, and later in
"Burghers of Petty Death," we find men and women together, more successfully
figured as equal representatives of humanity. "Modern Poetry," Stevens says,
"has to be living, to learn the speech of the place. / It has to face the men of the
time and to meet / The women of the time." In the second poem, written in 1946,
Stevens says:

These are the small townsmen of death,
A man and a woman, like two leaves
That keep clinging to a tree,
Before winter freezes and grows black--

This "woman," equal in her humanness to the "man," marks a new
moment in Stevens in which "she" is not only validated but recognized both as a
presence and as a human being, rather than tracing in either idealized or
"monstrous" discourse the path of failed signification and signifiers. If I were
to indulge in psychological explanations, I would consider the possibility that the sheer,
overwhelming and uncontrollable violence of the Second World War reduced all human beings
in Stevens' eyes to the position of "women" in the ironically-realized,
metaphorical sense of the word. We are all without power, not just women, in this modern
world, unable to control the world and possibly our own lives.

from Wallace Stevens and the Feminine. Ed. Melita Shaum. The University of
Alabama Press, 1993.

Mark Halliday

His Collected Poems is not the book a reader might expect from the author of
these appealing lines about what modern poetry requires:

It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place.
It has to face the men of the time and to meet
The women of the time ...
It must
Be the finding of a satisfaction, and may
Be of a man skating, a woman dancing, a woman
Combing.

Admittedly, to quote only these lines from "Of Modern Poetry" is to distort
the poem by avoiding the lines where Stevens stresses the subjective and solitary quality
of the poetic event as it occurs wholly within the mind, performed by and for the mind.
Nevertheless, the lines quoted above have crucial force in the emotional effect of the
poem. They seem to propose a tenderly accurate perception of the lives of individual human
others as an obligation of the modern poem, an obligation whose respectful fulfillment
will lead to satisfaction. Surely it is hard to hear those lines without feeling that the
satisfaction to be derived from the kind of poetry thus recommended will involve, or will
at least facilitate, some amelioration of the relations between people, between the poet
and the men and women who are to be faced and met. Stevens undoubtedly knew, and intended,
that such encouragement concerning interpersonal relationships (as a matter beyond the
scope of the solitary mind's satisfaction with itself) would be a palpable component of
the poem's emotional impact. He knew, moreover, that to give this lovely emphasis to
poetry's capacity for the imaginative encountering of other persons was to invoke an
available tradition in English and American poetry distinguishable from, though often
co-present with, the tradition of the lyrical "I" who contemplates his own
relation to life (Nature, time, memory, love, death) and distinguishable as well from the
tradition of the representative speaker who can use the word "we" in uttering
something true for all human beings. One kind of great precedent, in the work of achieving
penetrating awareness of the lives of persons different from the poet, is of course
provided by the dramatic monologues of Tennyson and Browning. But Wordsworth and Whitman
are the poets whose efforts to recognize other persons give the cited lines of "Of
Modern Poetry" their most resonant ancestry.

For my example from Stevens I want to skip ahead to a time when the Modernist
experiments had been digested, so that an artist might reflect on the entire historical
process, distilling the formative years of Modernism into a single abstraction about
abstraction. No one lyric quite does that, but, as the criticism it has spawned indicates,
Stevens's "Of Modern Poetry" comes as close as we are likely to get to the goal.
Whereas Williams, in the essay on Matisse, saw the energy of the compositional act as the
means to renew our sense of writing's possible relations to the concrete world, Stevens
presents an introspective meditation on the significance of that ability to focus. He is
less interested in the world of appearances per se, however composed, than in the way the
powers of composition displayed in art afford principles for defining the self and for
recovering, within a lucid Modernist consciousness, vital forms of old evaluative
predicates such as "nobility" and .'freedom." That quest entails indulging
in the same quasi-mystical language as that used by the founders of nonrepresentational
art. But Stevens presents his claims so self-consciously, and so concretely, that he
suggests the possibility of such diffuse abstractness making plain secular sense. . . .

The poem's concerns are obviously Romantic ones, yet both its vision and the basic
means for realizing it are distinctively Modernist. Were this a meditative lyric by
Wordsworth or Coleridge, looking within would be a corollary of aligning the self with
energies in the natural world, but in Stevens's poem the world beyond the self has no
symbolic resonance. That world enters the poem only as the force of historical change,
destroying old fictions and making the demands that dominate the third stanza. As the mind
tries to respond to all that history contaminates, it locates the necessary resources in
its power of self-reflection. Different as these concerns are from Williams's, they still
demand a version of his basic strategy: An authentic Modernism must be based on a
fundamental contrast with some blocking condition in the very center of our capacity to
represent experience. Only by such contrasts can the foregrounded compositional act
exemplify a possible cure of the ground. But whereas Williams resists a flawed condition
of apprehension (the woman's nakedness cannot be told), Stevens resists a flawed condition
of judgment (the old theater's fixed scripts neither match modern reality nor indicate our
capacity to fulfill ourselves in adapting to that reality). The new theater must prove
itself by developing new ways of handling the baggage of discursive thought. At stake is
not simply how we see objects, but how we conceive the nature of objectivity and the
powers that produce it: how, in other words, we face the domestic entrapments so
horrifying to Duchamp. Stevens's is a poetry about how the mind's eye can represent
itself, when it reflects on its acts as metaphoric equivalents to the suns.

A lyric with such ambitions must render the mind as simultaneously subject and object
of the poem: The essential affirmative content of the poem must reside in the quality of
its self-defining activities. Thus, instead of seeking symbolic or dramatic resolutions in
some illusionary world, Stevens's poem relies on its own structural and metaphoric
processes as its means to express, and to test, its capacity to escape the initial state
of bondage. The initial dramatic situation is defined simply by the mind's awareness of
change and the sense of lack that this awareness generates. Modernist self-consciousness
emerges as a process of negation, orienting itself through the lens of all we have lost or
can no longer be: yet that sense of loss is not without compensations. It brings in its
wake a harsh realism, no less threatening to our vanity, but nonetheless offering terms by
which the mind can take responsibility for its situation. Therefore the poem quickly turns
to a list of necessities, which takes form as a strange litany based on the refrain
"it has to. " The formal repetition enables the mind to focus its attention on
its own needs, processes, and powers, so that it can sustain a sense of responsibility
sufficiently intense to inaugurate a counterpressure to the spirit of negation.

Defining that counterpressure poses the poem's most difficult challenge. Stevens must
show how reflecting on necessities creates a stage for a responding act capable of a great
deal more than contemplating its own victimization:

It
has
To construct a new stage. It has to be on that stage
And, like an insatiable actor, slowly and
With meditation. speak words that in the ear . . .

Notice how the movement of these lines establishes a set of capacities entirely
different from the poem's initial entrapment in its own pathos. The introductory theater
metaphors had sustained a flat, prosaic syntax of isolated, brief clausal units.
Self-consciousness begins in a domain of fact and tired language. With the litany, the
language shifts to simple descriptive expressions, charged with syntactic urgency. Now the
language once again changes, as we arrive at the need to construct on a stage. Similes and
qualifications enter, and direct urgency gives way to a series of slowly unfolding
repetitions and aural echoes that suspend the flow of thought into a lush state of
reflective self-absorption.

The poem becomes its own subject, in every sense of that term. Its hovering over its
own metaphors arouses, and justifies, an increasingly erotic inwardness (in the delicatest
ear of the mind), suggesting that we participate on a new stage, where the process of
abstraction can withdraw into itself that reality pursued by lovers of truth. Now it must
be the words that become our actors, "heroic" by virtue of what they let an
audience realize about its own powers. as it listens, "not to the play, but to
itself, expressed / In an emotion as of two people, as of two / Emotions becoming
one." What this heroism entails is perhaps clearest in the intricate evasions of the
repeated ''as." An emotion that is ''as of two people" holds out the promise of
also conjoining the two emotions into one, because anyone can share that ''as."
Anyone can step back from her activities as an empirical subject in order to explore other
forms of intentionality defining possible transpersonal forms that our desire can take. Is
this not precisely what the poem is doing in asking us to participate in its own
depersonalized structure of internal relations, as if we entered a work of music? When we
share the ''as'' of comparison, linking the two emotions, we also share the ''as'' of
temporal and qualitative equivalences linking the states of mind produced in, or as, those
emotions.

These equivalences return us to Williams's "so." Now, though, the focus is
less on the physical space that the equivalences make possible than on the processes of
self-consciousness required to negotiate this poem. Stevens's equivalences serve primarily
to compose a self-reflexive world that minds must admit they share. For then the poem, an
act of mind, can provide concrete testimony for the values that can be attributed to such
acts. Because we realize that it is ultimately the audience that gives substance and depth
to the ''as," as it reads, we must treat reading as bound to the same stage and
capable of sustaining the same process of self-articulation. We enter a strange
intentional state in which we must look at our own reading processes as if they were not
quite our own, not quite the possession of any one subject, because of the way that they
distribute emotional investments, ''as of two emotions becoming one." Not as overtly
radical as Duchamp, Stevens nonetheless demands the same flexible imagination in his
audience, as it watches itself enter new structures of intentionality. The
transpersonality there realized is, at best, potential or virtual, but once we see how the
poem refers to its own activity, those virtual dimensions are inseparable from our
reflections on the text. And once we allow such virtual states to take on reality ,
everything that Stevens had said about "nobility, " in his prose statement,
begins to make clear sense. Substance has become subtlety, and the actor's composing of
this theater has defined "precious portents of our own powers. " Yet these
portents owe nothing to the bitter glass. They depend on minimal ideological claims and
require no representation. Rather, they depend on our ability to look beyond the contents
of our representations to the shareable virtual space produced by reflecting on what we
must bring to the representations that can satisfy us. Eloquence itself floats free of its
anchors in ideology, to embody powers that we cannot but see enacted in our own
constructive activity as we participate in this theater.

Having so constructed this complex stage, Stevens goes on to describe the actor. The
hero composed of these processes has the combined traits of the metaphysician and the
musician, a blend of the most abstract and the most sensual of properties. Music provides
the objective rhythms that physically align our bodies to the becoming of the emotions,
and metaphysics adds the metaphoric scope that allows the bodies to inhabit the romance
space initially opened by traditional ideals of truth. The hero, then, is anyone able to
internalize the language that can make "rightnesses" out of listening to the
music that the poem produces within the erotic movements of its own syntax. Because
philosophy becomes less a descriptive quest than a means for positioning the mind so that
it can appreciate what takes place in the self-reflexive acts that the discipline
engenders, the poem's clarity about its own processes ultimately establishes a
self-subsuming structure that literally enacts its basic claims. A mind displaced from the
fixed scripts of a symbolic theater finds, simply in its own articulate rendering of its
condition, a "strong exhilaration / Of what we feel from what we think" (Collected
Poems 382).

By identifying itself with these "portents of its own powers, " the mind can
reject the dangerous alternatives otherwise inescapable for self-reflexive Modernism. At
one pole is the temptation to "rise" to a mystical aesthetics or a translunar
paradise, where one imagines oneself dwelling in a realm beyond secular appearance. The
other pole is an entrapment in infinite irony, the demonic "other" of
transcendence. A mind unable to find a home for its powers descends to violent satiric
energies or to self-negating processes as the only remaining authentic or lucid use of
imaginative energy. For Stevens, though, the aim is to eliminate any sense that desire
requires a specific domain where it can find adequate objects. Desire is fulfilled, not by
possession but by reflection: by the satisfaction that comes from feeling that one's
imaginative terms are defining the very needs they construct. Then there need be no fear
of displacement, because there are no energies of thought that cannot be expressed and
understood as potential lyric grounds for engaging self-reflexively in our common humanity
at its most intense.

Full "containment" of the mind, however, demands more than this state of
participation. Stevens wants us to be able to reflect upon that condition as itself
composing a distinct imaginative site, where we see, in concrete figurative terms, what
these levels of containment make available. So Stevens turns to another aspect of form,
using his conclusion to indicate how the poem's abstract patterns give substance to the
self-reflection that they free from dramatic illusionism. Formal structure becomes the
means to articulate the ultimate grounds that warrant the poem's status as a transpersonal
schema for the experience of value.

First, the climactic "[it] may be," in the last stanza, connects these
concluding lines to the earlier pressures imposed by the "it has to" and
"it must." The pattern so formed defines a thematic progression from the
recognition of external necessity, to an internal alignment of one's choice with one's
fated chance, to a resulting freedom to revel in all contingencies. Having accepted his
confinement within history, the mind can value all of the particulars that constitute its
place and provide it with terms for reflecting on its relation to that place. This
acceptance then produces a second, pronounced formal pattern that clarifies the relational
principles on which the entire act of mind depends. As the poem steps free at the end into
pure particulars, it also steps back, to repeat the sense and syntax of the opening line,
thus making "the poem of the act of mind," a physical framework that is
literally the ground for the theatrical gestures. That echo, that end in its beginning,
insistently refuses all transitive verbs, as if the delicate sonorities of the third
stanza were only segments of a finer, more encompassing, quasi-physical space that only
words can compose. The framing gestures give the poetic voice the aura of serving as the
mind's body, now able to account for the eros charging all of the particulars that enter
this action. By syntactically projecting a dimension of the "act of mind" that
exists outside of time, the denial of transitivity and the repetition suggest the quality
of meditative theater, composed by and hushed for the sounds that can wholly contain the
mind as it links author with audience in a site on the margin of history.

To view these static qualities as pure aesthetic form, however, would be to impose
contraries where Stevens sees complements operating on different levels. His point isnot
how space contrasts to flux, but how a constructed space makes it possible to feel one's
own activity of mind as physically occupying that space, in way that renders ittranspersonal
(as if one could not distinguish scene from act) .Therefore Stevens is careful to
eliminate all active verbs from the act of mind that sets that scene: Rather than let any
specific action set the stage, Stevens wants language to emerge as if the desires
underlying all verbs called the poem into being. That is why, when particular verbs
finally do appear, they seem in effect to channel those desires into specific permissions.
The poem moves from "must," to "may be," to a series of participles
that serve as emblems for the continual generating of imagined objects of
attentionall poised between the substance of nominalized states and the activities
that elicit and satisfy desire. Details such as combing are absolutely casual, and the
casualness is never transformed into symbol. The transformation that does take place is on
a different level: Casualness itself becomes resonant and reverberates, without ever
tempting us to confuse the energies of composition with putative meanings inthe
world, and thus infectible by it.

As a treatment of objects, the poem inhabits a poetic universe completely defensible
before modern analytic thought. Instead of relying on symbols, it depends solely on the
energies of perception and construction. Such energies make no direct claims upon the
practical world: "Nothing has been changed at all." But, as Wittgenstein
suggested in his early works, there can be total transfigurations of the world that alter
none of its factual qualities. Simply by understanding that one "must" construct
some attitude toward objective processes, Stevens sees that one may be able to envision
one's own desires as the very source of the world's vitality (perhaps a secular,
subjective analog of God's creative fiat): It may be any particular that becomes
"part of major reality, part of / an appreciation of a reality / And thus an
elevation, as if I left / With something I could touch, touch every way" (Opus
Posthumous 117). As the poet imagines, he performs modes of thinking that are
not merely regulative forms or the confirmation of ideas about maturity. Rather, the poet
focuses attention on the activities of framing, which allow us to treasure the varied
world we have, and he reminds us that in the rhythm of concentration producing dispersals
of the self, we find ourselves more truly and more strange, as the possessors of a power
we all share.